In my prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,723,846, reference is made to the fact that in industrial applications high current is an essential factor in such machines. The patent provides a capacitor structure which permits the realization of higher currents with low frequency supplies so that solid state devices may be employed in place of vacuum tubes and further suggests employing full wave rectification to provide in a sense parallel operation, i.e. two half wave rectifier circuits, to increase current.
The currents that can be realized by the apparatus of my prior patent are suitable for present needs but not necessarily the requirements in the forseeable future. Further, the apparatus required a special capacitor structure rather than the conventional structure employed in the standard Dynamitron, i.e. the apparatus of U.S. Pat. No. 2,875,394. Although the patented structure is useful in special situations, it is not suitable for use as a mechanism for providing high current standard production equipment.
An alternative approach that has been proposed to achieve increased current is to parallel rectifiers in each stage. The difficulty with this approach is twofold; first, diodes have different firing voltages and current capacities so that the system cannot be balanced, and second, it is not possible without utilizing prohibitively expensive sensing circuits to determine when one such diode in a multiple is not functioning. The first problem can be solved theoretically by inserting a resistor in series with each diode but the IR losses make such an approach wholly impractical.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a high voltage accelerator constructed of conventional building blocks in which the current of the machine may be increased as desired by increasing the number of such building blocks and connecting them in dual multiple parallel circuits.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a standard rectifier stage including capacitors and rectifiers from which a high voltage accelerator may be readily assembled and wherein a preselected number of units are physically arrayed serially (thereby affecting only the length of the machine) and interconnected in series and parallel as desired whereby to determine voltage and current, respectively, of the final apparatus.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide parallel arrays of capacitor-diode rectifier circuits of standard construction and to produce current carrying symmetry as an inherent function of the design.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a multiple parallel path rectifier circuit permitting independent monitoring of current in each such path whereby to trigger shut-down upon failure of a path.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus capable of achieving the objects set forth above which apparatus may be executed as a half wave or full wave and/or single or multiphase rectifier circuit.